Holly Day

Holly Day

Mirage

In 1906, eager to turn back and come home, Admiral Robert Peary claimed to be able to make out the distant peaks of an ice-free land just off the coast of the North Pole. Great clouds of steam rose from this land obscuring most of the details, but through his spyglass, he declared he could see great beasts moving around, perhaps oxen, perhaps something else. The Inuit who accompanied him

seemed to confirm his story with a legend of a land somewhere past the great, glacial masses of the Pole warmed by geysers and unfettered sunlight, where the seabirds stayed yearround and there was abundant game and fishing, and that was probably what he had seen through the eye of his spyglass. They went on to say that occasionally, a hunter would wander far enough out on the ice to reach this land and when he did, it was so warm and comfortable that he’d never return.

Peary, unable to see the proper outline of the land through his insufficient spyglass drew a rough outline of where he thought this place was on the maps he had made of the Arctic a small island of solid ground surrounded by a moat of melted ice named it Crocker Land, in honor of one of the financiers of his trip. One can only imagine

how the harsh, blunt consonants of “Crocker Land,” must have sounded, the random association of this land with an unknown, New York City banker to the Inuit guides, who probably had a much more beautiful name for the half-glimpsed fantasy all future aerial photographs disproved.

Holly Day

“I Have Eaten One of Every Type of Bird in This Forest,” Said the Ornithologist

He opens the wings of the bird over the nest poses her protectively around the clutch. At the last minute he rearranges the eggs so that the ends all point towards one another, instead of lying haphazardly in the basin of leaves and twigs as they did when he first found his subject.

The little bird’s head lolls to one side, glassy eye stares back up at nothing. Sighing, the ornithologist picks up the little body, sets it back down in the nest, restores the maternal pose props the head up with a bit of straw against her neck, where it can’t be seen. She could be alive now a tiny blue-green finch, patiently shading her brood against her breast, under her outspread wings.

He fills out his sketch with a backdrop of greenery surrounds his prey in platitudes, a vision of some place untouched by the fans of his books.

The Myth of Correspondence

To fully understand the pictures I have sent you first, fill a bathtub with water and ice get into the tub with all of your clothes on. Only then should you shake these photographs out of this careful assemblage of paper.

This is the only way you’ll be able to understand the shades of weather that separate us, the only way to separate yourself from your envelope of tropical breezes and permanent sunshine. I will speak to you through the ice bruising your skin a frigid wraith clinging to you from too far away.

Holly Day